For those who don’t know, the line is a misquotation attributed to Canadian ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky, known as the "The Great One" in North America. While Gretzky might not be well known in Europe, through his famous words – the “Gretzky dictum” - his fame in Europe’s business community is now spreading rapidly.

The misquotation was supplied by Cupidi, of Italian incubator Cirlab. Keeping Cupidi company on the Masterminds Panel were Carol Dukes of Thinknatural.com, Logitech founder Daniel Borel, Ulf Jonstromer of Swedish investment firm Brainheart, and moderator Coleen Kaiser of Merrill Lynch. All of them wrestled with the tough question of what’s coming next for Europe’s new economy.

According to Daniel Borel, predictions about the future of technology have a bad history. “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” he quoted the US Patent Office as having said in 1890. His point was well made: “Sometimes we overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.”

Although the telephone was invented over a century ago, it has taken many years to build the network that eventually gave birth to the Internet, he reminded the audience.

There were mixed views on the future of wireless technology, a hot topic since European governments started cashing on the licensing of radio spectrum. The much-discussed Bluetooth wireless technology had it fans on the panel, although Ulf Jonstromer of Brainheart was less convinced. He saw embedded technologies taking off, but not at first based around a single standard.

With the PC, the Internet and the semiconductor revolutions in full swing, where was the next big “disruptive” technology going to come from? There was a consensus that large-scale changes in technology or the use of technology created opportunities for entrepreneurs, but the panelists were hard pressed to agree on the nature of the next major change.

Carol Dukes suggested it might come from biotech, reminding the Internet-hungry audience that perhaps the age of online innovation might not be at the heart of the future. Longer term, Daniel Borel hinted that it might be the audience or customer who would change as “personal broadcasting” – people communicating with one another on a mass scale using sophisticated, integrated technologies - took off.

As far as the relative positions of Europe and the US were concerned, Cirlab’s Cupidi was convinced that leap-frogging would be the order of the day, as each continent reaped the advantages of early adoption of a particular technology but ended up being passed by the late-comer.

“It’s great to be second,” he said, neatly summing up what could turn out to be the biggest future trend of them all: overturning conventional wisdom.

“If I had to put my money into one thing, it would be psychotherapy,” said Cupidi with a convincing degree of prescience.